[This article featured reviews of several orchestras. Our excerpt below includes all text relating to the Minnesota Orchestra performance.]

…[Osmo] Vänskä’s programmes with his excellent, fresh-and fullsounding and acute [Minnesota] orchestra each culminated in a more than hour-long symphony: Bruckner’s Fourth, given with a wonderful cohesiveness and glow, albeit in an edition imposing dubious cuts; and Beethoven’s Ninth. This traditional Proms item (which is no longer reserved for the penultimate night) involved the BBC Symphony Chorus and a team of soloists among whom the bass, Neal Davies, stood out: I’ve rarely heard the invocation of joyous tones after the finale’s second bout of dissonance made more meticulous yet powerful. And Vänskä’s insightful way with the piece ensured that the three previous movements always retained a preludial tension, no matter how conclusively expressive they might seem: everything tended toward the sublime – and here, brilliantly controlled – finale.

Paul Driver
The Sunday Times

When it came, the applause for Herbert Blomstedt and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (Prom 62) was ear-splitting.

More telling was the reverential silence that preceded it. This was a concert of uncompromising seriousness, from Hindemith’s intricate extrapolation of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, Symphony “Mathis der Maler”, to the monumental stained-glass panels of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Framed by two triptychs of angels and demons, redemption and torment, one dizzyingly vertical, the other as broad as the horizon, Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen was almost light relief. Yet Christian Gerhaher’s clean, contained singing gave this headily perfumed concentrate of bitter disillusionment, violent fantasy and mocking natural beauty an intimacy and directness of expression rarely achieved in orchestral song.

Having played Parsifal under Claudio Abbado, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester are no strangers to complex textures or large canvasses. With 12 double-basses arranged in a magnificent line along the back of the stage, behind and above the brass and percussion, the balance was secure and clear. The dancing counterpoint of Hindemith’s Engelkonzert was delivered with minimal vibrato from the strings and bell-like notes from the brass. Flute, oboe and clarinet lamented sweetly through the Grablegung, while the lacerating, demonic trills, consoling cellos and Praetorian syncopations of Versuchung des Heiligen Antonius were perfectly balanced and contrasted.

Reduced to 70 players, the orchestra’s Mahler was similarly vivid, the hushed pizzicato bass notes at the close of “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht” barely audible, Blomstedt’s balancing and rebalancing of the textures of “Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld” cinematographic in its lushness and dexterity. Chaste and cool but for the hot, guttural rasp of “Ach, was ist das für ein böser Gast!”, Gerhaher’s sound was almost that of a tenor, pure, unadorned, conversational. The first imprecatory movement of Bruckner’s unresolved symphony had numinous heft, the roiling Scherzo was a nightmare of mechanistic brutality, its hedonistic Trio an image of rouge-and-petticoats temptation.
In a work that is more easily admired than loved, the Adagio was a long exhalation of briney Wagner tubas and sour flutes, the grit and throb of the violin theme a shock after the tonal chastity of the preceding movements. Devoid of extraneous drama and flailing gesture, each movement closely linked to the next, Blomstedt’s Bruckner had impeccable authority and clarity.

The Minnesota Orchestra is unique in North America in having addressed the issue of how to play Beethoven on modern instruments in a post-period-instruments age. While its cousins in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Cleveland and elsewhere still cultivate a high-gloss, heroic, late Romantic sound, Minnesota has honed and trimmed its strings to Size 6 gym-bunny litheness. Backgrounded for much of Berg’s Violin Concerto in the second of their Proms appearances, (Prom 57), they floated serenely over the orchid-house flutes and chill brass chorale as soloist Gil Shaham traced the delicate, dewy figures dedicated to the memory of Manon Gropius. In Osmo Vänskä’s athletic sprint through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, their attack was brilliantly unanimous and fearless, though there was precious little rubato and no space for the players – or the audience – to breathe and wonder. For much of the symphony, Vänskä appeared to be trying to manoeuvre a large dirigible through a very small aperture, which, in a way, he was.

Last weekend brought a head-cold of terrifying efficiency and merciful brevity. Fearing the death-ray glare of the cough-monitor who stands in the arena at the foot of the Door 3 stalls, turning programme fumblers and bag-rustlers to dust with a single glance, I kept my snuffles to myself and listened to Prom 61 at home. Radio isn’t the medium for fat-suits, see-thru macs, pink wigs or false breasts, let alone gingerbread models of the Royal Albert Hall (a nice touch), but Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s semi-staged performance of Hänsel und Gretel with the London Philharmonic Orchestra had wit and tenderness enough to restore the innocence that Laurent Pelly’s arch 2008 staging sucked from Humperdinck’s sugar-frosted score.

Making his Proms debut, Robin Ticciati started slightly stiffly in the Overture (again a lack of rubato), only warming up in the Hexenritt. In Act II the LPO excelled, their woodwind birdcalls just the right blend of naivety and artfulness, their strings and horns sweet and solemn in the Hymn. The same qualities could be heard in Lydia Teuscher’s sprightly Gretel and Alice Coote’s Hänsel – so ardent, rich and true, with something of the throaty, no-nonsense delivery of a continental boy treble. Somewhat colourless in the first Glyndebourne run, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s Witch has developed into a thrillingly uninhibited comic/horrific turn. William Dazeley and Irmgard Vilsmaier were the harried parents, Tara Erraught and Ida Falk Winland the Sandman and Dew Fairy. Blame it on over-the-counter cold medicine or late-onset sentimentality, but I loved it.

Anna Picard
The Independent

The times, they are a-changing among American orchestra.  Once there was the Big Five—Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia—and then the rest.  No longer.  Of the old magic circle, only the Chicagoans really impress these days.  The most exciting relationship in America is the new one between the young Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the most satisfying musically is this partnership between Vänskä and Minnesota.

Vänskä’s Ninth (Prom 57, Royal Albert Hall, London) ***** was brilliantly executed by an orchestra who cared enough to come on stage a full half-hour before the concert began, with Berg’s Violin Concerto, and mostly stayed on during the interval to ensure they could do justice to the Ninth.  And they did.

If, at Vänskä’s speeds, the first movement was a bit hectic, the other three were pretty much perfect; an ebullient, frolicsome scherzo, followed by a well-paced slow movement and an exuberant Ode to Joy finale, in which joy was always the watchword.  Vänskä’s exceptional gifts were especially apparent in that slow movement.

Some original-instrument conductors get it down to 11 minutes, and lose any sense of repose. Some old school conductors extend if to 16 or 17, and become becalmed.  Vänskä, at a few seconds under 13, kept the music flowing while bringing out all the spiritual radiance that makes this adagio one of Beethoven’s greatest inspirations.  I’ll take off the anorak now, but it’s this sort of thing that turns a routine performance into a memorable one.

Vänskä is a serious-minded musician, and the better the music the better his response.  He’s devoid of podium glamour, but riveting to watch, as, like a demented marionette, he drives on his players with ever more extravagant lunges.

Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius.  She died of polio at just 18 in 1935.  This concerto became Berg’s own memorial because he himself died, aged only 50, just a few weeks after completing it.  He had contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite.

This searing piece, with its kaleidoscope of emotions, and multiple musical allusions, notably to Bach in the finale, is as far from a display piece as it’s possible to imagine.  Vänskä and his dedicated soloist, Gil Shaham, held me spellbound throughout, at least in all the bits I could hear in what is surely the worst venue in the world for such an introspective piece.

David Mellor
Mail on Sunday

. . . Shaham reappeared two nights later in Prom 57 with the Minnesota Orchestra, under the more inspiring baton of Osmo Vänskä in another great concerto from the Thirties, that of Alban Berg.

One of few American orchestras touring Europe this summer, the Minnesotans are among the world’s most cultivated bands. And under Vänskä, who has more to say about Beethoven than most conductors today, their Beethoven Ninth was everything one hopes for but seldom hears in this towering masterpiece.

Blistering attack in the scherzo contrasted with a consoling slow movement that anticipated the joy of the finale; even the Janissary music here sounded fresh and understated.  The soprano Helena Juntunen led a well-balanced quartet of soloists.

John Allison
The Sunday Telegraph

The audience was on its feet immediately demanding an encore from both the Orchestra and Gil Shaham, who obliged with a rolicking, fiery Turkish folksong, Nihavent Longa, that he arranged for violin and orchestra.  It proved the perfect match for his playful, joyous Mozart.

The evening was a fitting finish to a splendid, succesful tour.

Nothing, though, can ever prepare a listener for the dizzy momentum of the first movement, when a conductor such as Vänskä is energising the orchestra with his entire body and honing the cutting edge of the musical argument until it all but draws blood. And then, with the tip of his baton, drawing out the finest thread of an oboe or clarinet line which, somehow, you’d never heard before.

The Minnesotans’ pride in Vänskä and in themselves is now palpable. And when this fuses with a conductor’s long-considered yet ever self-regenerating understanding of a score, then the air is electric. The second movement all but levitated in its cosmic dance, minutely held back here and there to touch on a moment of bucolic earthiness.
And in the Adagio molto cantabile, song led easefully and inevitably to the oratory of the finale, with the bass Neal Davies reawakening the music to joy. Not a hint of sententiousness here, nor in the following long lines of arioso: Vänskä kept every instrumental voice on a taut rein.

When the BBC Symphony Chorus finally burst out, their every syllable was sharply marked. Vänskä treated the voices very much as orchestral forces: no mouthing of words from the podium, for this was not, for once, word-led. Rather, the chorus propelled and upheld the swirling, stratospheric voices of a particularly well-matched vocal quartet, with Davies joined by Eric Cutler, Charlotte Hellekant and Helena Juntunen.

Earlier Gil Shaham made a swift and welcome return to the Proms after his Barber Concerto, to substitute for an indisposed Lisa Batiashvili in a sentient and beautifully shaped performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto.

Hilary Finch
The Times

There’s a scene in the 1980s Jack Nicholson film, The Witches of Eastwick, in which the mystic music teacher, Susan Sarandon, pirouettes joyously around the classroom while her kids – usually a talentless bunch – spontaneously play Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik from memory, accelerating to fever pitch under her spell.

I only mention because it came momentarily to mind this week while watching Osmo Vänskä conduct Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – not the players, though you’ll find similarly surprising levels of spontaneity in the Minnesota Orchestra’s playing – but more that moment of magic when, having cast a spell, the conductor takes a step back – literally – and relishes the results. Vänskä brings real passion to the podium.

At times he jumps so vigorously his feet leave the platform; others he crouches almost to his knees in order to achieve the softest of pianissimos; and where the music dances, so too does Vänskä, arms outstretched and limbs ungainly, like a waltzing marionette carried by the sound.

The results in each of the Minnesota Orchestra’s two concerts made for thoroughly engaging listening. On the Friday they brought their full-bodied sound to an early programmatic essay by Barber – Music for a Scene from Shelley – and provided sterling support for Alisa Weilerstein through the caustic monologues of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, followed by Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony.

On the Saturday, they brought their unanimity of sentiments and sensitivity to violinist Gil Shaham’s free-flowing delivery of the Berg Concerto, but it was perhaps Vänskä ’s ability to inject fire and precision into Beethoven’s warhorse, the Ninth Symphony, that was most impressive – it all sounded so incredibly fresh.

If I had any gripes about the Beethoven, they were about its odd mix of soloists – the soprano Helena Juntunen’s operatic delivery almost derailing the melody at one point in the Finale – and the BBC Symphony Chorus simply lacked the added power when it was required. One wonders how much time they had had to rehearse.

Nevertheless, Vänskä showed why the Minnesota Orchestra’s has become a sound to be reckoned with since he took up the baton there in 2003. Perhaps my only other regret was that he could not have arrived 24 hours earlier to save us from the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Sibelius’s Second Symphony under David Robertson – routine by most standards, pedestrian by Vänskä’s.

Nick Shave is a freelance music writer, critic, and contributing editor to BBC Music Magazine. He has spent many happy summers reviewing the Proms, but is still prone to a loss of bearings when choosing the quickest way round the Royal Albert Hall.
BBC Music Magazine

Vänskä’s preference for tension and detail over volume and textural weight results in playing of exceptional lucidity from an orchestra that often functions with the precision of a chamber ensemble. Shorn of its usual upholstered opulence, Bruckner’s Fourth has a combination of rawness, sensuousness and grace that peers back through Wagner to Schumann and Beethoven. The latter’s Ninth, meanwhile, was extraordinarily volatile, even in the adagio – done with rapturous fluidity on this occasion.

Neither performance was without controversy. The Bruckner was given in a new edition by Benjamin Korstvedt incorporating cuts that, some have argued, were made under pressure and are therefore inauthentic. And Vänskä’s insistence on precise enunciation in the finale of the Beethoven led to syllabic, declamatory singing from the BBC Symphony Chorus. They sang from memory, though the less than ideally matched soloists remained score-bound.
BBC Proms 2010

The Bruckner was paired with Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, played with understated virtuosity and sardonic humour by Alisa Weilerstein. Berg’s Violin Concerto, meanwhile, accompanied Beethoven’s Ninth. Gil Shaham, a late replacement for the indisposed Lisa Batiashvili, was the soloist in a touching performance that combined great formal control with nostalgic intensity.

Tim Ashley
The Guardian

He was back in Scotland with his Minnesota Orchestra, and a programme that might not have seemed out of the ordinary – Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Beethoven’s Symphony No 7, prefaced by Barber’s tone poem Music for a Scene from Shelley.

In Barber’s score, the passion and angst grew inexorably from its whispered opening on lower strings, to a whopping climax, beyond which a sense of spent ecstasy faded to a magical pianissimo on the horns. Such was the quality of delivery, the whole impression was that of a rich, glowing film score.

But how sensitive was the orchestra’s role in the Elgar? Nothing suggested the post-Victorian indulgence we often hear from wallowing old-fashioned accounts. Instead Vänskä underscored cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s unfussy interpretation – clean, unforced streams of melody and delicate frissons to match – with suppressed precision and, where it mattered, poignant splashes of colour.

Nothing could have prepared us for his super-refined performance of the Seventh Symphony. Nothing extrovert or garish. This was Beethoven revisited in a way that paired away the excesses of posthumous convention, and saw great music in a fresh and honest light.

Kenneth Walton
Edinburgh Evening News